Recognizing the Contributions of Women at Recurly
International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The theme for International Women's Day 2020 is #EachforEqual. According to the International Women’s Day website, “Individually, we're all responsible for our own thoughts and actions - all day, every day. We can actively choose to challenge stereotypes, fight bias, broaden perceptions, improve situations and celebrate women's achievements. Collectively, each one of us can help create a gender-equal world. Let's all be #EachforEqual.”
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we're spotlighting a few of the incredible women that help make Recurly the inclusive workplace it is today. Recurly was founded on a set of core values that inform everything we do. These values support and help drive our goal of providing a top-notch product and an excellent experience for our customers and our employees. It all starts with our people. Attracting, hiring, and nurturing the best talent is the key to our growth and success. Our current team is 48% female and we have 22 women in leadership roles throughout different functions of the company.
Now let’s see first-hand what makes some of the women of Recurly rock:
Rachel Quick, Senior Director of Customer Operations
What is your proudest achievement at Recurly?
My proudest achievement has been the people I've brought to Recurly. From my first hire (Angie) to my most recent (Alex), Recurly has gained rare talent from unusual places. It brings me great personal fulfillment to watch stay-at-home parents, college students, people with no work experience, and people with no payments experience bring patience, a willingness to learn, and compassion to their roles. They are truly Recurly's best assets, and seeing their careers develop has made me so proud.
What does it mean to you to be a woman working in tech?
I wasn’t brought up to believe that tech was a path for me. I didn't have someone to nurture my interest in tech and even changed my mind about being a Computer Science major in college after an appalling experience as the only female in the cohort. I feel it's important to be a mentor and show other people (not just women) about the variety of jobs in tech. I make it a point to get out and talk about Recurly. I serve as a mentor to first year high school students, just starting to think about their future career, and I also serve as a lecturer and internship supervisor for high school seniors looking for careers in tech. I've spoken to students at my grad school about using their library science skills in alternative career tracks. As a single mom, it’s also been important for me to manage work-life balance. From working remotely from Minnesota to our FTO policy, which allows me the time for school field trips and extended summer weekends, the kind of creative thinking about the work structure at Recurly has been tremendously supportive. It makes me feel like I can ‘have it all’ which is a constant struggle I hear from many other women in the workforce. I know I am incredibly lucky to have these circumstances.
It’s also important to me to balance the time spent with left-brained activities at work doing right-brained activities outside of work. Finding time to be creative and artistic makes me a better person at work and more personally fulfilled.
What Recurly value most resonates with you and why?
Debate passionately. We wouldn't be Recurly if we didn't care so damn much. One of my earliest Recurly memories was watching our two founders, Dan and Isaac, whiteboard a concept and needing me to be the tiebreaker on a decision. Even from those early days, we'd walk out of a room with a decision that everyone could get behind. I’ve always felt that Recurly is not about individual people pushing their agenda, it’s a bunch of smart people working together to push the company forward.
Bekka Reese, Head of Design
What is your proudest achievement at Recurly?
Building and growing a team full of talented, motivated, and empathetic members.
Designing for the fintech space is challenging, and building both a strong brand and solid product is no easy task. It takes the right set of people with the right skill set and a collaborative spirit to be successful. I am so proud of the team we have today and am constantly inspired by their dedication and passion for the work we do.
What does it mean to you to be a woman working in tech?
"Women challenge the status quo because we are never it. - Cindy Gallop"
I started off my career in advertising, where leadership is known to be very male-dominated. Later in my career, I moved into tech where although I have found there to be more diversity in leadership, men still tend to outnumber women. While I have been fortunate enough to work for and learn from strong male leaders throughout my career, I do often wonder how my experience might have been different had I been able to learn from strong female leaders, as well, along the way.
Now that I find myself as a female leader in tech, I consider it to be my responsibility to be a strong example for my team. I seek to hire a diverse set of employees with varying perspectives and viewpoints. I work to empower my team to feel confident in each of their voices and to embrace the different perspective each of us brings based on our own individual experiences. I strive to mentor other women on my team and help grow them into our future leaders. My hope is that by being a strong female leader and in leading by example, this resonates not only with my own team but across our organization.
What Recurly value most resonates with you and why?
Be Mindful: We are champions of the user, and accountable to our teams.
This resonates most with me not only because of the value of user experience and mindfulness in general but also because of the need for differing perspectives in order to effectively achieve those goals. Diversity in viewpoints and experiences allow us to form better empathy for our users. This idea of shared mindfulness is essential in building a successful product.
Jenna Wyer, VP, Business Development & Partnerships
What is your proudest achievement at Recurly?
My proudest achievement at Recurly isn’t a single project or event, but rather the larger achievement of solidifying both old (10-year integration partnerships) and new partnerships. When I started at Recurly most of the companies that worked with us, seemed to pay us very little attention. They seemed to mostly engage with us if there was a problem with a shared customer.
During my two years at Recurly, I’ve seen some of the largest brands in the world including Adyen, Zendesk, and Worldpay realize the value of our product and how we can help them win and retain more customers. These same partners that didn’t immediately see the value of subscription technology are now excited about what we’ve built, and what we continue to work on as a company.
What does it mean to you to be a woman working in tech?
There is this fallacy that being a woman means you have to choose work or family. Either you spend your life gaining an education and having a full-time career, or you dedicate your life to having children and staying home to raise them. I’m lucky enough to say I’ve had both.
Ironically, my time in payments started when I met a woman in a playgroup, and her husband was founding a payment gateway called Braintree. When I met with him to discuss joining his startup, I was only working part-time as my kids weren’t in school full-time yet. I’m so grateful he took a chance on me. Years later he told me, after hearing about several life challenges I’d overcome, he knew my resilience and willingness to roll up my sleeves were more valuable than job experience he could find on a resume.
When I started in tech over a decade ago, it was a rarity to find a woman in payments tech, let alone a minority woman in similar job roles as mine. I’d sit on conference calls, attend meetings, and events, and be the only female in the conversation. I’m proud to say that’s no longer the case.
When I interviewed with Dan (our CEO), a question I had for him was how he felt about diversity in the workplace, and his hopes for the Recurly culture. It was immediately obvious to me he wanted the company to reflect global diversity, and having females in leadership positions was top of mind for him. As a company, we should be proud to have five amazing female executives.
As exhilarating as it has been building technology that has changed our culture, I’m most proud of the work I do at home as I’m raising humans that will have empathy and compassion for the world around them.
I’m currently raising two young adult women, that have watched their mom pursue a full-time career in tech, and seen me overcome so many obstacles including gender and race prejudice. They live their lives with the assumption they will be financially independent, have the opportunity to raise a family, and also live out their career dreams, with no limitations. I can only wish my example will give hope to other women around me, but if my experience will only influence how my daughters go out and change the world, it was all worth it.
What Recurly value most resonates with you and why?
Iterate Everything has been a Recurly value that has proved valuable in the realm of partnerships. Each partner has a unique personality, each having its own priorities and timelines. The partner solution from partner to partner can’t be cookie-cutter, and often, the first strategy with a partner may not yield fruit or interest.
As we work to expand the partner ecosystem and continue to strengthen our partnerships it’s important to be open to new ideas, have the flexibility to quickly pivot if something isn’t working, or a partner changes their mind in terms of what might be important to their organization.
Kim Courvoisier, Director of Content Marketing
What is your proudest achievement at Recurly?
Every day I come to work at Recurly is a proud moment because I am working alongside some of the best and brightest talent in the industry, both men and women. I feel a great sense of pride knowing the work we do at Recurly is helping businesses use subscriptions as a competitive advantage. The competition is fierce these days and knowing we are helping businesses grow and thrive is something that drives me to do my best work every day.
What does it mean to you to be a woman working in tech?
I was raised by a single mother to be fiercely strong, capable, and independent and now, as a single mom, I’m raising my daughter with this same spirit, drive, and responsibility to own her path to independence.
I’m inspired every day by the women I work with. We are role models for the next generation of women coming up in tech. My dream for this next generation is that the glass ceiling will be shattered and we won’t have to be recognized as women in tech but as people in tech, regardless of gender and true equals among the men we work alongside. I’m proud to be part of a strong squad of women paving the way for that new reality.
What Recurly value most resonates with you and why?
Iterate Everything and Own the Outcome.
Iterate Everything resonates with me because as a content marketer I am constantly testing copy, messaging, images, etc., to see what works best to engage our audience and which content performs best in each stage of the sales funnel. Based on that data I may go back and rework a piece or make changes and update it.
The other value that resonates most with me is Own the Outcome. I’m huge on accountability and, when you own the outcome, you accept responsibility for it whether it turns out great, or it’s a total flop. You use either outcome as an opportunity to learn from.
Wrap up
We hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse of just a few of the women that make Recurly such an amazing place. We know that regardless of gender, our team is our most valuable asset and we strive to create an inclusive environment for them to grow and be successful. Stay tuned for other employee spotlights in the future.
Join our team! We're hiring.
